The present invention relates to an information processing system such as workstations or personal computers which prepare, search and store a wide variety of media data including texts, graphics, images and video, or more in particular to the processing of browsing data for handling a scaled-down image of documents, etc.
In the conventional information processing systems such as the workstations and personal computers in which the documents or spreadsheets are prepared, data such as graphs and image data applied from an image scanner are stored in a memory such a disk in the form of a file. The operator causes a list of file names and icons to be displayed on the display screen and designates the file name or the icon of the desired information thereby to access a particular field.
In JP-A-1-276347 entitled "Information Processing System", a predetermined page data of a file is extracted and the page data thus extracted is scaled down. The page data for a plurality of files thus scaled down are displayed on the display unit simultaneously. The user can easily search for the desired data by viewing the scaled-down data of the pages.
Also, the thesis entitled "How to Handle Large-Scale Document Data in Hypermedia Authoring Tool" by Kii, et al., pp. 3-345 to 3-348, a Collection of Lectures at the 44th National Convention of the Information Processing Society of Japan discloses a method in which the scaled-down image of each document page is displayed on the screen or the contents of each page are displayed successively in the same region.
Displaying the scaled-down images of each page of a document on the screen or the contents of each page successively in the same region will hereinafter be referred to as the "browsing".
In the method for displaying a list of file names or icons on the screen and causing the user to select any one of them, however, file names, names of persons that have prepared them, the date of preparation and symbols representing the program used for preparation are displayed at most. To access data contents, therefore, it is necessary to invoke the application program by which the data has been prepared or which displays the data contents.
Further, JP-A-1-276347 and the "Hypermedia Authoring Tool" fail to refer to the browsing of the data prepared by the existing application programs. More specifically, the data input or edited by the program offered by the system can be browsed, while the data prepared by other programs cannot. In the latter case, for the program offered by other than the system, the browsing is made possible by generating and managing the browsing data corresponding to the data prepared by the program. To realize this, however, it is necessary to reconstruct the program in such a manner as to generate browsing data or to prepare a data conversion program for generating a browsing data from a program-specific data for each of the programs. Also, preparation of a data conversion program makes it necessary to know the program-specific data format.
Further, the above-mentioned prior art fails to refer to the image quality after scale-down. More specifically, because of a scaled-down image, the lines are reduced in size or thin out, or the text information or graphics information are substantially lost. As a result, although the person who has prepared the data can associate the page contents, the user who simply references cannot substantially obtain the information on the pages. Also, the data quantity is increased due to the image information that is handled, and it takes a considerable time before data is read out of the file and displayed.